Unlikely allies fight all-mail voting

Groups cite fears of lax controls and lost ballots

Jason Osgood, left, Julie Goldberg, Richard Brokowski, Gentry Lange with the Green Party and Tim Boarder -- all foes of mail-only voting -- make their point by becoming poll station voters.

Jason Osgood, left, Julie Goldberg, Richard Brokowski, Gentry Lange with the Green Party and Tim Boarder -- all foes of mail-only voting -- make their point by becoming poll station voters.

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Jason Osgood, left, Julie Goldberg, Richard Brokowski, Gentry Lange with the Green Party and Tim Boarder -- all foes of mail-only voting -- make their point by becoming poll station voters.

Jason Osgood, left, Julie Goldberg, Richard Brokowski, Gentry Lange with the Green Party and Tim Boarder -- all foes of mail-only voting -- make their point by becoming poll station voters.

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Unlikely allies fight all-mail voting

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It was a strange-bedfellows moment: A lawyer from a hard-right advocacy group, a former Green Party candidate and a self-described "dues-paying Democrat" joined Wednesday to protest a proposal for all-mail voting in King County.

"Moving to vote-by-mail would be a major step backward for King County in terms of security and integrity in their elections," said Jonathan Bechtle of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation. The non-profit organization in Olympia spends much of its time railing against public-teacher unions, big government and taxes.

As part of the event, staged outside the county administration building downtown, a half-dozen protesters declared that they are switching their registrations from permanent absentee to poll voting.

"The more I know, the more I realize that poll voting is better for the voter," one of the switchers, Juli Pettingill, said. Pettingill also belongs to Citizens for Fair Elections, which was organized last fall mainly out of concerns that computer hackers could steal elections conducted on touch-screen voting machines.

Most King County voters already mail in their ballots voluntarily: Nearly 70 percent in November 2005, a rate that has been steadily increasing. That trend is the strongest endorsement of voting by mail, county elections director Dean Logan said.

A proposal before the County Council would convert to a full vote-by-mail system in 2007, bringing King in line with 34 of the other 38 counties in the state; council Chairman Larry Phillips of Seattle, leader of the council's Democratic majority, supports the changeover. With more than 1 million registered voters, King County would become the largest single election jurisdiction in the nation to vote by mail.

Although all voters would receive ballots in the mail under the proposal, any voter could drop off a completed ballot in a secured deposit box -- or even vote instead on a touch-screen machine at one of 10 regional voting centers.

With both poll and mail voting, the county now operates two complex, parallel voting systems, Logan said. Converting to one would allow for a smoother, more efficient operation, he said. No longer would the county have to hire 4,000 temporary poll workers to handle hundreds of thousands of ballots in the crush of election day at more than 500 polling sites.

Logan has not talked up a couple of other benefits of mail voting claimed by some proponents: that it's cheaper, and that it increases voter turnout.

Although Logan said other counties in the state report savings, the conversion in King County initially would require a $1.8 million outlay for voter education, office space and other expenses. The county is seeking federal grants to cover the cost of new equipment. Some of the upgrades would be required in any event to handle the growing number of mail ballots, he said.

As for turnout, the consensus of research suggests that voting by mail doesn't affect participation much in presidential elections, but does boost the numbers for low-profile elections, basically by drawing in otherwise regular voters who might skip those contests.

Opponents point to the county's difficulty in accounting for mail ballots in the November 2004 election, when the number of ballots counted didn't square with the number of voters recorded as voting. That variation was cited by the Republicans in their legal effort to overturn the narrow victory of Democrat Christine Gregoire in the governor's election.

Skeptics also question the accuracy of the signature verification system used to validate mail ballots.

But the judge who rejected the GOP claim didn't pay much attention to the accounting discrepancies, Logan said, and signature verification wasn't even raised as an issue in the case. Automated verification, approved by the Legislature this year, should bring consistency to the process, he said.

Voting by mail also is subject to fraud through interception of mailed ballots, critics say, pointing to criminal cases in other states. They also say it increases the risk of double voting when voters inadvertently are mailed two ballots. They worry about spouses, other household members or even interest groups pressuring voters to fill out ballots in a certain way.

Oregon is the only state to rely on mail voting for all elections, adopting it by popular initiative in 1998. Before that, both poll and mail voting was allowed. In Multnomah County, with 380,000 voters in and around Portland, that hybrid made for "horrible" elections, county elections director John Kaufmann said.